Land Grabs

A land grab is the large-scale systematic acquisition of land in an unlawful or opportunistic manner, often in reference to the colonial conquest for Native land by European powers, a famous example being the “Cherokee Strip Land Run" of 1893.

Scramble for Africa

The scramble for Africa may be the most infamous period of land grabbing known as is the outline for most modern justification for the aforementioned conquest. The scramble refers to the period between the 1880s until the 1920s when European powers rapidly colonized African countries to benefit their nationalist and economic motives. This was a brutal period that involved a series of complex interacting actors, yet is also indicative of the colonial mentality backed by capitalist fervor in the urgent need to collect natural resources. The brutality of this period extended so far that only two countries – Ethiopia and Liberia – maintained rightful sovereignty.

Sierra Leone

To preface, after the devastating Sierra Leonean civil war in 1991, which lasted over 11 years, the country actively sought foreign investment into the mining and agricultural fields. In this effort, at least 20% of all of Sierra Leone’s arable land is leased to foreign businesses under the guise of development ventures, these investments into the agricultural field were land-grabs for monetary benefit of the transnational corporations and had devastating impacts on the local populus.

In 2024, Professor Bankoly Theodore Turay published a study for the University of Lagos examining the effect that land grabbing by foreign companies had on Sierra Leonean farming families. He concluded that the industrial monoculture plantations being placed on local land previously owned by families is effectively a modern land-grab attempt from transnational corporations, and is an inherently immoral action for monetary gain.

Legally, this colonial overreach onto Sierra Leone's families farmland was not only permitted but encouraged by the government as it was generally beneficial for the gross domestic product of the country, increasing from 1.934 billion USD in 2002 (civil war end), to 6.412 billion in 2023. Yet, native families were still driven out of their land and the supposed economic benefits were reaped predominantly by business and mining company owners rather than the overall population.

Ghana

Throughout 2007 - 08, Ghana faced a multifaceted complication as the looming global financial crisis saw the extreme shortage of food and energy which resulted in 50,000 acres of land being lead to the Diamond Solar Salt Company to combat the economic turmoil the country was facing. Yet, the leader who signed the land away did not have rightful ownership, contributing to the lasting conflict we see in the Volta Region (shown to right) today.

This land grab uses a quite infamous strategy that was initially developed by the European-Americans drafting treaties with Native Americans that were not qualified to speak on their communities behalf, and is now evidently repeated by transnational corporations in Ghana.

Despite the abhorrent violation of a communities sovereignty as well as the stripping of local families farm land, there are no legal protections fighting for the acquisition of the land and there probably won't be any development in the near future as the corporations contributing to the land grabs hold egregious amounts of legal power, which local people who are affected cannot combat.